Not on display

Summary

Television Portrait (Cathy, London) is a large colour photograph of a woman lying on a couch. She is on her side, her head and shoulders propped against one of the sofa cushions and most of her face hidden behind her right forearm and hand. The photograph was taken in low light and with a shallow depth of field. As a result, only a narrow strip of the photograph is in focus and becomes the focal point of the image. This is the edge of the woman’s forehead and nose, her right hand and forearm, the tips of two fingers of her left hand which peep out from under her right wrist and parts of the brown sofa in the same focal plane. Behind her bare left shoulder, her denim-covered hips and legs stretch into the soft, blurred background. Her bare feet virtually disappear against a stripped wooden door surrounded by a white painted lintel set in empty beige walls. Stains on the carpet in the foreground add to the sense of a comfortable, domestic environment. Graham has framed the woman’s body in a way that emphasises her relaxed pose rather than any particular visual attributes. The atmosphere of the image is informal and intimate, the colours dark and rich. Cathy, the subject of the photograph, could be asleep. In fact she is watching television, which the orientation of her face indicates to be on the right side of the picture frame. This is the first of Graham’s ongoing series of Television Portraits. Other portraits include Television Portrait (Jack, Bradford) 1989 (Tate P77637), Television Portrait (Danny, Bristol) 1991 (Tate P77636) and Television Portrait (Yuko, Kyoto) 1992 (Tate P77638). All the TelevisionPortraits are framed in black and produced in an edition of five. Tate’s copy is number three.

Graham began making colour photographs in 1978. He was influenced by the work of American photographer William Eggleston (born 1939), whose seminal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 introduced colour photography to the realm of high art. Two early series, A1 The Great North Road (book published 1983) and BeyondCaring (book published 1986), stem from Graham’s experiences as a young graduate (Bristol University, micro-biology, 1978) on the dole. In the latter series he photographed unemployment offices, documenting the poverty and hopelessness suffered by many people in Britain at that time. These photographs combine photojournalism (traditionally associated with black and white photography) with the use of colour and a strong conceptual framework. Graham has described this series as ‘confronting the economic violence being done to a large section of the population by early 1980s Thatcherism’ (quoted in Paul Graham, p.12). A subsequent series, TroubledLand (book published 1987), was shot in Northern Ireland and depicts apparently normal landscapes which on closer inspection are found to have been insidiously affected by the political troubles there. Graham then began travelling around Europe and flying regularly to Japan, producing further series New Europe
(book published 1993) and Empty Heaven (book published 1995). He unintentionally began the Television Portraits in 1989 during a period at home in London in between trips abroad. In 1996 he explained that:

they were the antithesis of working in foreign lands: taking photographs in your own home ... I was with my flatmate watching television, and just took this picture, Cathy, and realised how beautiful it was ... I keep doing it. Funny thing is, I can’t set them up. I’d like to have about twenty of them, and I’ve got twelve now, but it never works when I say, can I come round to your house and do one of you? I tried it, and it just doesn’t work.

(Quoted in Paul Graham, p.30.)

The subjects of Graham’s Television Portraits all look away from the camera, their gaze focused on the television outside the picture frame, and their bodies in a passive state of watching. At ease in the environment of their own homes, they appear relaxed and unselfconscious. Graham uses photography as a means to explore, literally and metaphorically, the ways in which societies mask or conceal their historical wounds. With his Television Portraits, he has discovered a means of eliminating much of the masking conventional to portraiture. This has resulted in images which reveal aspects of people not normally on public view. For a recent series of portraits he photographed young people in bars and clubs in cities in the First World. These are collected in a book entitled End of an Age
(1999).

Display caption

Many of Graham’s works reflect on socio-political issues. In contrast, his Television Portraits are surprisingly intimate and domestic. The series began with a spontaneous photograph of the artist’s flatmate, and extended to include images of people watching television all over the world. Although they meditate on the power of mass media and the ubiquity of television, the television is not visible in any of the photographs.